Dirty Love (25 page)

They’d met in church, this bald man in a black frock coat who would sit with her in one of the two chairs on the porch. They would speak quietly, as if they each had intimate knowledge of a close friend in trouble and they did not wish to be rude. Sometimes he would laugh, but she would not. Perhaps she smiled. It was the only time she was truly pretty. She kept her red hair pulled back and up, and she never wore makeup, her eyebrows thick as a man’s, her eyes a glinting blue, her cheekbones a bit too sharp to be lovely. But it all softened when she smiled, and though he had no gift for telling a story or a joke, Francis worked hard to make that happen. Yet if he tried to impersonate someone—the iceman for one, a tall Italian whose shoulders dipped to the right even when he wasn’t lugging a block of ice—his mother would shake her head at him with a quiet urgency, as if what he was doing was being watched by someone powerful who would surely punish them all.

Francis put his glasses back on. Things are clear again, everything he sees Beth’s. There’s the oak rack of spices hanging above the stove, each of the bottle caps labeled and facing out alphabetically:
Anise
,
Basil
,
Coriander
. There are her reading glasses hanging from their neck straps from a clip magnet on the side of the fridge, beneath that a reminder card for an appointment with the dentist that came and went without her. There is the yellow linen spread on the table. They bought it at a yard sale in South Carolina from an obese blind woman who’d told them that the tiny blue flowers etched into the cloth were hand-sewn and called African blue lilies. That was a good trip, and Francis was grateful to Beth for making him do it, to just get in the car and start driving. Why not? They were both retired. Were they just going to sit in their living room in front of the TV until they died? And Beth was different when they traveled; it was like watching one of her own flowers get more water, fertilizer, and sun, its stem straightening, its leaves opening. She’d sit in the passenger seat beside him, a map or guidebook on her lap, her glasses magnifying her eyes a bit too much, and she’d tell him the names of small towns just off the highway: Mooresville, Hickory, Cary, High Point. She’d read to him all the history she could find, and she’d want to take any exit that looked promising, though most of them looked good to her because of their numbers: 37, 13, 9. Or simply the names of towns, their very sounds. One was Joslin, a soft girl’s name, so they were both expecting to find a central green surrounded by clothing shops and a bookstore, maybe an ice cream parlor, pub, and café. Instead they found a stretch of strip malls and gas stations leading to an industrial park of squat cinderblock buildings surrounded by a high chain-link fence. At the paved entrance Francis turned their car around and headed back for the highway. Beth had shrugged and said, “They need a new name for that place.”

Francis probably agreed, as he so often did with his wife, whether he agreed with her or not, but that detour to Joslin had done something to him, had flushed some black bird of regret from the brush; it was too much like something else.

Back on the highway, Beth switched on the audiobook they’d been listening to, one of those novels set in the royal court of France with all its incest and adultery and bloodletting, and as the actor began to read once again, Francis knew what it was: driving into Joslin only to discover what they had was a bit too much like marrying Elizabeth Harrington only to discover what he had, that despite her work at St. Mary’s Hospital nursing the sick and injured, despite her dry wit at the restaurant dinners he would take her to, despite her green eyes that appeared warm and nothing like his mother’s, despite those soft-looking lips that smiled at any of his failed attempts to be funny, despite the way her body fit against his as they danced to a song on the jukebox or once a live jazz band at Benny’s in Boston, despite how much she seemed to admire his choice not to work for his brother in insurance but to teach instead, despite how tenderly they’d made love that very first time, how after she’d held his cheeks and looked into his eyes, hers welling up while he was still inside her, despite all these signs of only good things to come with Beth as his wife, what he had not seen, or had not allowed himself to see, was how critical she was of everything and everyone but herself.

Last week Devon allowed her mother to visit just long enough to bring her more clothes. Marie stood in his living room taking in Beth’s stack of paperbacks beside the sofa, her throw blanket draped over the hassock, a pair of her slippers on the floor beside it. His nephew’s wife is so much larger than she’s ever been, her sad and lovely features nearly lost in flesh, and she glanced at him with pity for his transparent grief. He could not say he did not feel grief, this dark empty corridor inside him he seemed to be wandering down alone, but what could he do with this other feeling? That after forty-three years of hearing nearly daily of his shortcomings, it was a welcome respite to be left alone? How could he say that since that sudden January evening of last year, what he felt now was a dumbstruck sense of freedom for which, daily, he felt the need to apologize?

D
EVON IS PAST
the strip walking on the edges of lawns. Across the street is the ocean she doesn’t look out at, but right before she left The Whaler she glanced at it because the sun had just broken through the gray and the surf broke on the barrier rocks and she liked how they glistened. She’s thirsty and sweating. Her jeans feel sewn against her legs and crotch, and she just wants to take a shower and why did she tell Francis she’d study for that fucking test?

In her head plays something soft. It’s that skinny British boy moving his fingers over his piano keys the way Sick would run her hair back away from her face. Devon hits shuffle till it’s the band from Las Vegas, the lead singer skinny too, and he always wears vests and string ties like cowboys and his songs are half-mad, half-sad, like he’s about to do something he’ll always, always regret but he can’t stop himself.

Devon leaves it on and crosses the side street to the lot of the 7-Eleven. An open Jeep is parked there, the top down. One boy sits in the passenger seat, two more in the back. They all have their shirts off and they’re all looking at her. She takes them in for only a half second, but she can see they’re her age, maybe a year or two older. Tanned. Dark tats around their arm muscles to make themselves look badass, the two in the back with an earbud in each ear, sharing an iEverything, the one in the front wearing shades, and she steps up onto the concrete walk in front of the store and grabs the door handle and she knows they’re checking out her ass in her black jeans and they may even be calling out to her but she’s got her Dr. Dre phones on and that’s her excuse for completely ignoring them. It’s what she tries to do now, but she catches herself walking into the 7-Eleven just a beat slower than she has to, letting them linger on what she won’t ever give them.

The inside air is almost cold and her skin gooses up. She moves down the aisle past bags of chips and cans of dip to the drink cooler in the rear, the Vegas singer in her head suddenly a hard penis she’s sucking on, that part of it always a letdown, the rush coming before any of them unzipped their jeans or dropped their cargo shorts and she got down on her knees or lay down on a bed or leaned over in the front seat of a car or once squatted up against a tree while her old boyfriend shoved himself into her mouth and throat and his friend caught it all on his phone and then everything that would happen began to happen.

Devon grabs a Diet 7UP. The can is barely cool, though, so she grabs a Coke instead. She won’t eat much later to make up for the calories, and besides she needs the jolt to get through Francis and his “lesson.” Such an old word. One that comes from an old man. But because it comes from him, she can’t hate it.

A new song comes on now. It’s desperate and too fast, the lead singer with his string tie no longer a hard-on to her but a fucking baby crying over how jealous he is. She reaches down and flicks her finger across the screen till she gets one with only instruments. They’re ancient, from a CD Sick gave her from a movie about Jesus. The word
Mesopotamia
is in her head. And
Aramaic
. Words from the only class she ever liked from the only teacher she’d ever liked at a school she’d only ever hated. This is music from some land of goats and olive trees, wooden flutes and lambskin drums that beat together like a herd of camels racing or a throng of people pulsing in jeering waves at Jesus forced to carry his cross, the thudding in her chest as her father’s Lexus pulls out of the driveway on a Saturday night, Charlie Fucking Brandt behind the wheel, his thinning hair freshly gelled, Devon’s pathetic mother standing at the window pretending she doesn’t know what she knows, the crying that will come later that Devon will try to block out with her Dr. Dre’s, though she’ll still feel the vibrations of it in the air of her closed bedroom. Dangerous vibrations. Like she feels now as she reaches the counter and the driver of the Jeep is taking her in. He’s bigger than the rest. A faded red tank top over a shelf of chest muscles, blue eyes that ignore her face completely and drop to her breasts, hips, and crotch. Then he’s out the door and in his Jeep and she’s only looking at the man she buys a drink from every afternoon.

He has gray hair and dark skin, his shoulders narrow, ashy spots under each eye that make him look unhealthy. He never looks at her body, only her face, and he half smiles at her and takes her money without ever trying to talk to the girl wearing headphones. A man in her head cries out a song from some mountaintop rising above a desert plain, and she imagines it’s him, the man’s dry fingertips touching her palm as he places there one quarter and one dime, and then she’s out in the heat again and she’s glad to see the Jeep gone. She cracks open her cold Coke and drinks down half of it, swallowing and swallowing, and she sees Jesus down on one knee, that crown of thorns pressing into his forehead, the cross pushing its weight onto his back, and she walks across the lot under the sun, everything matched up again: the heat and this desert music, the smell of something dead coming off the ocean, a crowd judging you, a crowd of people calling you names and wanting only to hurt you.

F
RANCIS SITS AT
the kitchen table trying not to feel put upon. His grand-niece walked into the house right on time for their lesson, but she was flushed and sweating, the blue stud in her nose a bright contrast to the red headphones over her ears.

“Uncle, do you mind if I take a quick shower first? I
stink
.”

“No, not at all.”
He had practically yelled this for he never knew if she was talking to him through blasting music between her ears or not. She smiled at him and disappeared down the hallway. Moments later he heard her bathroom door close, but that was over forty minutes ago, nearly thirty of it with the water running.

This is not a new situation for him, of course. With the hard cases, it was always a walk along a high wire. Call them to task and then risk having them close themselves off more than they already were; ignore this opportunity to teach Devon something important—about consideration, for example, or someone else’s water bill—and abdicate his responsibility to her entirely. But what
was
his responsibility? It wasn’t Charlie or Marie who had called him at one in the morning on a Tuesday, but Devon, this young woman he’d known and loved since she was an infant.

“Uncle Francis?” She sounded as if she’d been crying or drinking or both. He was in bed and had been asleep a long while. When the phone rang in the darkness, he thought
Beth. It’s Beth
. And he sat up and jerked the receiver from its cradle. He needed to know where she’d gone, and he needed to explain himself.

“Uncle?” A plaintive voice. Then there was Beth lying in her casket in pearls and a light blue dress, and Francis was trying to make out the glowing orange numbers of the alarm clock. He began to see the face that was joined to the voice in his ear, his grand-niece who had her mother’s pretty eyes and small mouth, her father’s square jaw. Her own chopped bleached hair.

“Devon?”

“Can I come live with you?”

Her voice had sounded so small and it’d carried him back to the child she’d been just a few years before. Diminutive and thin with black hair she liked her mother to braid for her, how after an Italian Sunday dinner Marie had cooked, Devon liked to sit on the lap of her Great-Uncle Francis and he’d read to her from books she’d pull from her shelf. But once, when she was six or seven, it’d been a fairy tale that ended badly for everyone, something Francis hadn’t seen coming. “Uncle? Did all the kids really get
eaten
?” And her young voice seemed to come from a part of herself poised to curl up away from the world.

“Devy? What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“I can’t take it anymore. They’re fighting. Everybody’s—”

“Who’s fighting?”

“My fucking
parents
. Please, Uncle, please—”

There was more to that conversation, but he no longer remembers it. And there was more to Devon’s troubles than her mother and father’s faltering marriage, something he sensed without Marie’s long-winded, worried, and vaguely defensive emails to him either.

Francis sips iced tea, adjusts his glasses, and reads again the sample essay topic from the GED website:

What is one important goal you would like to achieve in the next few years? In your essay, identify that one goal and explain how you plan to achieve it. Use your personal observations, experience, and knowledge to support your essay.

But what if the student has no goals? What then? What if his or her only goal is to get through today? Francis had seen so many kids like that over the years, the ones who openly slept on their forearms on their desks, or those who couldn’t sit still and would do anything to make their day more interesting: write
cunt
eater
on the board just before class; flick a pen cap at a slow girl across the room; light up a cigarette ten minutes before the bell rang—Jimmy Swansea, the way he sat back and blew smoke out his nostrils and stared at Mr. Brandt staring at him. What Francis had wanted to do was march down the aisle and grab Jimmy’s throat and jerk him up from his chair, but Jimmy was six feet and a hundred eighty or ninety pounds, a boy who, like so many of them, was being raised in a neighborhood much like Francis had been raised in too—no fathers, or if they had them, they were bad fathers, drunk or cruel or distant or all three. And mothers who, unlike his own, had given up in some way or another so that these children sitting before him—too thin or too heavy, poor teeth and bad skin, one or two surprisingly fit-looking, like Jimmy Swansea—were to him solitary ghosts just drifting from one demand on them to the next, and on his good days he could usually summon enough compassion for them to at least try to do the right thing.